Since it appears that the forwarding list will never be in ASF custody, I don't see how the
project has any recourse but Plan 1.
Everything else depends on action by Oracle or access to processes operated by Oracle. I
recommend that Oracle action be requested and that Plan 1 be carried out regardless.
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Weir [mailto:robweir@apache.org]
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 08:06
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Shutdown of openoffice.org email forwarder: How to notify users
It looks like the email forwarder will not be migrating to Apache. We
don't want this to be a surprise to users. We want them to have ample
notice to adjust to this change. I'd like to have a discussion on how
we can best do this, and to see if there are any volunteers to help
with this.
==Plan 1==
Publish details on AOOo wiki page, and publicize via mailing lists,
website and social media.
We can make a wiki page that covers:
1) Clear statement that the forwarding service is going away, why and when?
2) What will happen with emails sent to these addresses (we are not
storing any emails, we do not touch them. They will be bounced and
the sender will get an error message)
3) What the user needs to do (notify people and services that send
emails to their openoffice.org address and ask them to update their
address books and records with the new address)
4) Where to go for more informaiton/questions (maybe ooo-users?)
If we can get that written up, perhaps with some translations, then we
can get the message out via:
1 Apache and legacy OOo mailing lists
2. website home page (both AOOo and OOo)
3. Facebook, Twitter, Google+
This is similar to what we are doing with the mailing list migration.
It is low tech, easy to roll out.
==Plan 2==
Bulk notification of all 500,000 forwarding accounts that the service
is going away. Same information as above, including translations, but
pushed to users. This approach would require Oracle to send the
notifications. I'm am not certain this is feasible.
==Plan 3==
Like Plan 2, but if Oracle is not able to send bulk notifications. We
could extract addresses from public sources, including Bugzilla,
legacy OOo mailing lists, etc., and send these notices ourselves.
==Plan 4==
Another solution would be to take advantage of the period of time when
the mail forwarding service is still working to notify users. For
example, take the following scenario:
a@foo,com sends an email to b@openoffice.org, which is then forwarded
to b@bar.com
Until the email forwarder goes down, we insert an extra step to cause
an additional email to be sent to b@bar.com, letting them know that
the forwarding service will be going down. This is a way to notify
all active users of the forwarding service.
Any ideas for other approaches? Any volunteers to work on any of
these approaches?
Regards,
-Rob